After much thought and many delays, I've finally made the commitment to get an MBA. I've scheduled my GMAT exam for March 7th, which depending on who you ask, is either more than enough time, or not even close in terms of studying.

First, I'll go into some background details. The degree is (at least partly) being paid for through my company's tuition reimbursement program. With my work schedule, not to mention the only way I was able to have the degree approved was to take courses which were fully online and would not interfere with my various travels. This limits me to only a handful of ACCSB accredited schools, and even less of which have any name recognition. On the positive side, very few of the top online schools have a mean score of 600.

While I haven't determined which school is at the top of my list, I have narrowed it down a bit:

• University of Michigan
• University of Massachusetts
• Florida State University
• University of Wisconsin
• University of Florida

Surprised that University of Phoenix or other online schools aren't listed? I was somewhat happy with the number of prestigious schools offering online programs.Right now, I'd say Michigan is at the top of the list, with the only caveat being that they charge so much for online classes that it would take me a long time to finish the program, so I'd either need to pay for classes myself, or spread out the program longer than desired.

Now, with March 7th quickly approaching, I have a total of six weeks from when I first started preparing, until my GMAT exam. In preparing, I'm doing something that was rarely done in college - intense studying. While a 600 would probably be good enough, I'll be disappointed if I can't raise my scores much closer to 700 or higher.

My weakness going into my preparation is easily verbal. With two engineering degrees, the quantitative section shouldn't give me too much trouble. I've mapped out my strategy over the next few weeks as follows, working one book from cover to cover each week, while doing practice exams:

• Week 1 - Princeton Review GMAT
• Week 2 - Official Guide
• Week 3 - Official Guide Quantitative
• Week 4 - Official Guide Verbal
• Week 5 - Kaplan Premier
• Week 6 - Kaplan 800

I took the first GMAT practice exam to give myself a baseline and it confirmed my suspicions:

My quantitative score was above average, and needed a quick amount of refreshing, but my verbal was terrible. After looking up the percentile, it was at 51%. Were I able to raise it to a 38, I'd get a 670 and a 41 would net a 700, assuming I could maintain my 44Q.

Based on this data, I'm even more certain that it will be easier to raise my score if I focus more on the verbal to understand some of the intricacies involved with the GMAT. While the bad news is that I was very low verbally, the good news is that nearly every question I got wrong was a sentence correction type problem, which will help narrow down what I need to focus on.

My first week is now over as well, and I'm done with the Princeton Review book, which was mostly a disappointment. Either I've set the bar too high, or they've set the bar too low. For instance - they have a diagnostic exam to take which then tells you what level of questions you should be working on to improve your score. Sound fair, right? Well, in both the quantitative and verbal sections, I was in the top levels, where I was recommended to practice in the harder pool of questions, known as "bins 3 and 4." The problem that I saw was that my preliminary GMAT score was expected between 450-550. Even if I had gotten every question right, I would have been given the designation of 550+, which I looked at in one of two ways:

1. Like other stories I've heard, perhaps Princeton lowers the initial expectations so that when you do well on the real GMAT, it will be better than the preparation scores, thereby validating the cost spent in their books and courses.
2. They aren't trying to achieve a high end score with this book, only to cover the basics and get you a mediocre score.

Either way, I'm glad to be done with the Princeton book and on to the Official Guide. A special thanks to JB for letting me borrow his prep books.